Many conditions are treated by taking one or more drugs at regular intervals, and the success of the treatment is largely dependent on the ability of the user to comply with the regimen associated with the drug. Management of regimen compliance is assisted by various reminding devices and systems, which either generate an alarm at certain specified times or inform the user whether or not a dose is due in response to a request for medication. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 4,419,016 discloses an alarm system arranged to generate an alert when a next dose is due to be taken and a time keeping system that displays the amount of time since a last dose is deemed to have been taken. The alert is generated on the basis of absolute time, in that, upon reaching a time that a dose is due, an alarm is generated, whilst the time keeping system merely serves to provide information to the user. WO 02/078593 is a development of the system disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 4,419,016, in that it uses the time that medication was last taken to identify time of next dose, that is to say it has a reminder system based on dose history informing the user whether a dose is due or not in response to a user requesting a dose.
It would be desirable to provide an improved alerting system for use in a medicament dispenser, where the generation of alerts is based on dose history.